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The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

by D.A. Carson
The Gold Medallion Award-winning book that presents a persuasive case for Christ as the only way to God in light of contemporary religious pluralism. The Gold Medallion AwardGold Medallion Award-winning book that presents a persuasive case for Christ as the only way to God in light of contemporary religious pluralism.

A great majority of social commentators attempting to define modern Western culture land on a common characteristic: pluralism. This isn't unique to secular culture. Many modern approaches to Christian hermeneutics, or biblical interpretation, have given credence to contemporary pluralism. What began as a refreshing restraint and humility in modern theology has fallen more and more into irresoluteness.

It's no secret that the contemporary challenges to Christianity are complex and serious. Yet, far from simple fear-mongering, or cultural warmongering, The Gagging of GodThe Gagging of God takes a hard look at the background and intricacy—of pluralism, postmodernity, and hermeneutics—and equips thoughtful Christians to have intelligent, culturally sensitive, and passionate fidelity to the gospel of Jesus Christ.equips thoughtful Christians to have intelligent, culturally sensitive, and passionate fidelity to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In his contemplative, even-handed approach, Carson provides a structure of Christian thought capable of facing the philosophies of today and piercing their surface. It invites Christians to grapple responsibly with urgent questions of biblically-grounded theology, spirituality, and the defining lines of Christianity, along with its range of challenges from without and within.         

The Gagging of GodThe Gagging of God offers an in-depth look at the big picture, shows how the many ramifications of pluralism are all parts of a whole, and provides a systematic Christian response.
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Paperback, 640 pages

Published February 18th 2002 by Zondervan Academic (first published January 1st 1996)

tags: theology, reference, faith, philosophy, christianity, religion, evangelism, nonfiction, cultural, christian 
Book Quotes
“Over the last several decades, government power has been in the process of massive expansion. One doubts whether this expansion can be turned around by the periodic triumph of a particular party, because the moral consensus necessary for sustained restraint is no longer present. On the long haul, people without a controlling vision beyond economic advancement will simply vote for more. That “more” may mean a temporary tax-break, but only rarely will it mean a cut in services. The more we demand, the more government takes; the more it takes and the more it provides, the more we think it unthinkable that we could do without what is provided. Such a world allows no aristocracy of excellence, for there are no agreed criteria as to what is praiseworthy, and therefore no direction toward which the country as a whole “pulls.”
― D.A. Carson
“Despite the sincerity of their motives, one wonders more than a little to what extent the growing popularity of various forms of annihilationism and conditional immortality are a reflection of this age of pluralism. It is getting harder and harder to be faithful to the “hard” lines of Scripture. And in this way, evangelicalism itself may contribute to the gagging of God by silencing the severity of his warnings and by minimizing the awfulness of the punishment that justly awaits those untouched by his redeeming grace. Newbigin is right: “It is one of the weaknesses of a great deal of contemporary Christianity that we do not speak of the last judgement and of the possibility of being finally lost.”56”
― D.A. Carson
“What is unsure is how long democracies can survive once they lose a controlling vision of the common good that extends beyond the merely pragmatic. It may take a long time—I certainly hope so—but it is hard to be optimistic. What seems so difficult for Westerners to grasp at the moment is that our problems are not merely economic (though many are tied to economics), but reflect the most fundamental questions of cultural cohesiveness. They touch all of life. They are as much tied to religion, philosophy, the family, heritage, direction, vision of the future, language, and everything else that contributes to any culture, as to the interest rate and the federal deficit.”
― D.A. Carson
“Third, the increasing empirical pluralism and consequent privatization of religion may lead to the creation of what Hannah Arendt calls the “atomistic mass.”31 She argues that for totalitarianism to occur there must be the progressive elimination of intermediate structures in society, and consequently the growth of direct dependency of every individual upon the central goverment. Sooner or later totalitarianism becomes almost inevitable.”
― D.A. Carson
“Fourth, as the previous chapters have shown, the rise of philosophical pluralism and of secularizing tendencies, especially in the media and in the academy, project an image of believers as old-fashioned, quaint, ill-informed, red-necked, “fundamentalist”—and therefore needing to be tamed. The left demonizes the right, and the right returns the compliment—but the left holds virtually all the positions of leadership in the media and in the academy. In short, the culture of our age firmly opposes all claims to transcendent authority, with the result that there is often a bias against believers. No small irony rests in the fact that the Pilgrim fathers left England because they were not free to practice the truth, and then left Holland for America because they perceived that the amorphous tolerance they found there was in danger of corroding their love of the truth.”
― D.A. Carson
“The inevitable result is that judges make decisions that are in line with their politics, their prejudices, their cultural alignments, their value systems, without reference to anything that claims to be stable or in any sense culture-transcendent. The best of them are very clever people who can always use the Constitution to support their biases. They are, in short, a reflection of the philosophical pluralism reigning in the land; we should not expect otherwise. Second, for various complex reasons, this is increasingly a time when judges rule. The people rule less and less, even through their duly elected legislators; unelected judges rule.”
― D.A. Carson
“Inevitably, individualism has made an impact on the way religion is conceived. The spread of privatized spirituality, developed apart from a disciplined and disciplining church, doubtless fosters desires for personal connection with the transcendent, but, at the risk of an oxymoron, it is a personally defined transcendence. Privatized spirituality is not conspicuously able to foster care for others.103 God, if S/He exists, must satisfy the prime criterion: S/He must meet my needs, as I define them. It is hard to resist the conclusion that this God is less the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ than a Christianized species of the genie in Aladdin’s lamp. Having abandoned authoritative revelation and ecclesiastical tradition alike, many in this generation find it easy to adopt all sorts of absurd beliefs, provided only that they serve personal interests: this is the age when huge sums are paid to psychic counselors, when even Time lists crystal healing as a possible medical remedy, when an American president seeks guidance from astrologers.”
― D.A. Carson
“When philosophical pluralism is allied, in the popular mood, with the notion of progress, so that those who disagree are often pictured as quaint vestiges of a bygone era, the pressure to conform is enormous, since the notion of “progress” has been a watchword of Western culture for at least two centuries.”
― D.A. Carson
“Liberalizing tendencies today are not usually associated with those seeking a return to Scripture.”
― D.A. Carson
“I have been arguing that Christians recognize the culture-relatedness of all truth, but that this does not jeopardize the objectivity of the revelation God has graciously provided in his Son Jesus Christ and in the Bible; that there are ways of thinking through how people come to know this truth, and the God who is its ultimate source; and that failure to recognize it for what it is—in short, failure to know God—is morally reprehensible, and marks a rebellion against the authority of the one who created us and who governs us. Several times I have hinted at the importance of adopting “the whole counsel of God,” of recognizing the distinctiveness of an entire Christian worldview if the parts within it are to make much sense. That means not less than following and adopting the Bible’s plot-line. In other words (to use the contemporary jargon), the Bible provides us with a metanarrative, a comprehensive “story” that provides the framework for a comprehensive explanation, a comprehensive worldview.”
― D.A. Carson
“Orthodoxy often requires us to be hard precisely where the world is soft, and soft where the world is hard. It means condemning the homosexual lifestyle and being labeled bigots. It means caring for AIDS patients though many think us fools. It means respecting the rule of law though our culture is increasingly lawless. It means visiting the prisoners who offend that law though our culture would prefer to forget them. In every way that matters, Christianity is an affront to the world; it is countercultural.43”
― D.A. Carson
“In this framework, although church discipline is being thought through afresh by many Christian groups,44 one of the areas where more thought is still needed is the manner in which churches that draw lines in the moral arenas—however graciously, humbly, gently, sometimes by degrees, but also firmly—are not only taking steps to align themselves with Scripture (and with the main strands of Christian heritage, for that matter), but are taking on the culture. Such steps become not only a matter of nurturing and protecting the faithful, but of showing a pluralistic world what Christian living looks like. This will alienate some; under God’s good hand, it will draw others, not least because the freedoms promised by pluralism are tearing society apart. In any case, we have little choice: elementary faithfulness demands it.”
― D.A. Carson
“This is not the place to anticipate the discussion, but two things may usefully be said. First, all but the most sanguine pluralists admit that there are immense dangers ahead and that signs of cultural decay abound.”
― D.A. Carson
“These pressures make it difficult for many Christians to draw lines. How many of us want to be classified with fundamentalist Muslims? Why not emphasize the communal and pragmatic values of our faith, in order to gain respect and avoid unnecessarily offending the people of our generation? Why not defend “the truth” merely as it appears to us? After all, that is in fact what we are doing, isn’t it—defending the truth as it appears to us? So why make offensive claims about the universality of truth claims? Why draw lines? It is painful to do so; it also seems impolitic. Why alienate people? Why should it be thought necessary to draw lines, when drawing lines is rude? In these few pages, my concern is not how to proceed with the evangelistic task (see chap. 12), but to ponder briefly some of the reasons why drawing lines is utterly crucial at the moment.”
― D.A. Carson
“Postmodernism is an outlook that depends not a little on what are perceived to be the fundamental limitations on the power of interpretation: that is, since interpretation can never be more than my interpretation or our interpretation, no purely objective stance is possible.”
― D.A. Carson
“Clearly, we have entered a world very different from the world of modernity as previously described. The subject/object distinction has broken down. In this world, foundationalism is a washout;49 the old distinction between fact and opinion is disappearing from view. The quest for certainty, precision, and ahistorical knowledge of objective truth is judged impossible. “Truth” is not an objective entity; the classic dikes between fact and opinion are springing leaks. Of course, not all the tenets of modernity have been sacrificed. Irrationally, philosophical naturalism (for most advocates of this radical hermeneutics), still holds sway; moreover, I must still say something about the place of science in this new model. But some variation of what once held the status of a minority report advanced only by a few intellectuals is now adopted almost everywhere.”
― D.A. Carson
“This is the time for Christians to be drumming home some fundamentals as part of our witness in the larger world. Whatever fine points we express or even fight over in our own Christian communities, on the larger scale we should be hammering away at a few basic points. It is painfully disappointing to find many clerics and Christian gurus, on the few occasions they find themselves asked for a Christian outlook on this or that question, unable to deliver themselves of more than a few ethical platitudes veneered with Christian vocabulary. We must constantly say that we were made by God and for him; that all of us will have to give an account to him; that our Creator is our Judge; that the grace we ourselves have received in Christ Jesus impels us to good works, but that our ultimate hope for the future is the end of history, a new heaven and a new earth that only God himself can bring about; that human hubris stands humbled not only before our individual deaths, but before the deaths of civilizations and finally of the world itself; that a society that does not recognize these points finally becomes grotesquely self-serving and exposed to the judgement of God.”
― D.A. Carson
“The question to ask is this: Are all the “interpretations” listed here, not least the mutually contradictory ones, equally acceptable to God? An atheist will be uncomfortable with such a question; a Christian must ask it. Is it enough simply to hold the beliefs of one’s “Christian” community? How about the interpretive community of Jehovah’s Witnesses? Mormons? Or how about, say, Muslims? Buddhists? Materialist Marxists? I do not know how Smith would respond to such questions. If he draws the line somewhere, then of course I will ask him how he knows that is the place to draw it. At the very least he has then admitted the existence of objective truth, the denial of which is dangerous. If, in line with the central heritage of the Christian church, he ties that truth to the Bible, then one must push hard and ask which of the other interpretations can properly be justified and which must be ruled out by what the Bible says—or will he retreat again to some vague notion of equivalent value in all interpretations? If he denies that there is any way we can know that we are pleasing God, and that the best we can do is live in line with our interpretive communities, what possible excuse could he make for Luther breaking out of one community to start another? Was Luther right? How do we decide? If Smith hides behind the community in the face of such questions, then his interlocutor is basically right. And I would review with him the points I have already tried to make in this chapter and the previous one. In short, I agree that all our understanding is interpretive, and that the interpretive communities in which we find ourselves are extremely influential. But this does not mean, on the one hand, that we cannot articulate objective truth, and on the other that our interpretive communities bind us utterly.”
― D.A. Carson
“individualism and personal choice in religion have largely displaced loyalty to denominational structures and to inherited doctrinal bastions. This makes it easier for individuals to be syncretistic, or, worse, confusedly pluralistic—i.e., people without strong doctrinal commitments may take on highly diverse and even incompatible ideas and fuse them in some way (syncretism), or they may take on highly diverse and even contradictory ideas without fusing them, simply letting them stand, unaware that the elementary demands of consistency are being violated.”
― D.A. Carson
“But the theological component is more serious. The Enlightenment tried to make human beings the measure of everything; Rationalism elevated human reason to godlike status; existentialism debunked significance based on knowledge or status, and assigned it to human action, will, decision; now postmodernity insists there is no objective truth that can lay claims on us. At its root, postmodernity is deeply antiauthoritarian, as even its most astute exponents recognize:”
― D.A. Carson
D.A. Carson

D.A. Carson


Donald Arthur Carson is a Canadian-born evangelical theologian and professor of New Testament.

Carson served as pastor of Richmond Baptist Church in Richmond, British Columbia from 1970 to 1972. Following his doctoral studies, he served for three years at Northwest Baptist Theological College (Vancouver) and in 1976 was the founding dean of the seminary. In 1978, Carson joined the faculty of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he is currently serving as research professor.

Carson has written or edited 57 books, many of which have been translated into Chinese.
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